How this index works
Sources
Dealers get in from the public trusted-dealer lists on RWG and RWI, plus RepGeek and r/RepTime when we can read them. Being on one of those lists is enough. So is being confirmed by two sources that don't depend on each other. The fields on a dealer page come from the dealer's own site, and each one shows the URL and the sentence it was taken from. Domain age comes from the first Internet Archive snapshot and from the registry.
Tier gates
| Tier | Requirement |
|---|---|
| Tier 1 · Established | Trusted Dealer on two or more forums, five or more years in business, no open reports in the last 12 months. |
| Tier 2 · Verified | Trusted Dealer on at least one forum, or two or more years in business with steady community mentions; no open reports. |
| Tier 3 · Listed | Meets the listing threshold (one year online, two independent sources) but not yet the criteria above. |
| Disputed | Has an open report from the last 12 months. Sits under all the tiers until it's settled. |
| Dormant / closed / scam | Out of the ranked lists. The page stays, with its history. |
Score within a tier
| Signal | Max | How it is measured |
|---|---|---|
| Years online | 30 | This year minus the earliest year we can verify, whichever is older: a stated founding year, the oldest archived domain, or forum tenure. Straight line, capped at 15 years. |
| Forum tenure | 25 | One point for each forum that lists the dealer as trusted, up to one more for how long, three forums at most. |
| Community mentions | 15 | How many different people mentioned the dealer in the last 90 days. We count people, not posts, so one busy poster can't flood it. We aren't collecting this yet, so it stays out of the denominator for now. |
| Availability | 10 | The share of our daily probes that got an answer, over 90 days. |
| Published policies | 10 | Whether the dealer's site says, somewhere public, how you pay, how you reach them and where parcels ship from. |
| Domain stability | 10 | Full points if no new address in 24 months, otherwise zero. |
| Confirmed reports | −20 each | Per confirmed report in 12 months. |
Score is points earned divided by points available, times 100. Ties go to the older dealer, then alphabetical. On factory, brand and payment pages, dealers with more of that page's subject on their site sort first inside their tier.
Update cadence
We probe every site daily. Once a week we re-read each site, recalculate scores, rebuild the pages and write up what changed. Once a month we re-read the forum lists and the domain registries. A page's modified date only moves when a fact on it moved.
What we do not do
- Nobody pays for a position. If we ever take sponsored placements they go in a separate box with a label on it, and they won't touch tiers or scores.
- No star ratings and no user reviews. We can't verify them, so we don't run them.
- We don't delete. A dealer that closes or gets dropped from a forum list keeps its page, with the status on it.
- We don't rule on reports. We note where the report was made and link to it.
Safeguards
A source that comes back looking wrong (an empty list, a third of the dealers gone overnight) gets treated as a failed fetch and ignored. Marking a dealer closed or scam takes two sources, or one of us doing it by hand. When a check fails nothing gets written, and the old data stands.